Thoughts occasioned on reading a history book

I have been reading Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. It is an interesting history of the personalities involved in the anti-slave trade and anti-slavery movements in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I recommend it, but it set me to wondering why this movement occurred when and where it did.

I think that it is not an accident that the movement started in England. England had a long history of devolution of rights from the monarch to other, and that cultural respect for freedom of some might have been especially conducive to thinking of freedom for black slaves.

The movement came after the Enlightenment, and i wonder how important intellectual atmosphere and legacy of the Enlightenment was in creating the cultural conditions that allowed the leaders of the anti-slavery movement to think their unthinkable thoughts. Britain was a center of Enlightenment thought, and that might be part of the reason that the anti-slavery movement started in England rather than France of Gernany.

The anti-slavery movement came during the age of revolution, and perhaps the revolutionary thoughts involved in freeing the American colonies from the British Monarch and involved in creating the French Republic helped to stimulate thoughts of freeing slaves from their masters.

This was also the time of the industrial revolution, which lead to mechanization of work, urbanization, rapid social change, and developed the Luddite movement in its later stages. England was the leading edge of the industrial revolution, and it hardly seems reasonable that that leadership was unrelated to the early development and success of the anti-slavery movement in England.

Hochshild acknowledges in passing that the end of slavery did not end exploitation of some people by others in what is the moral equivalent to slavery.That point might be worth a lot more emphasis. The plight of the Irish during the potato famine, and their emigration in death ships to try to survive, does not appear to be a great advance in freedom over outright slavery. Indeed, the Irish rioted in the south of the United States for access to the better jobs then being held by slaves.

Today there are hundreds of millions of people in debt bondage, not to mention many people still in slavery held by criminals, diplomats, etc.